Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Introduction

Translucent is a tile type in JCS. It is set by right clicking on a tile in the tileset window of JCS, selecting tile type in the drop down box, and clicking on translucent. Alternatively, you can use Shift+T, for a quicker way to set it, although you can’t use Shift+T to make a tile untranslucent.

Usage

A translucent tile is a tile that you can slightly see through. You can, for instance, make windows translucent, so you can see both the window, and a little of what’s behind it. When you make a tile translucent, it behaves quite differently from an event. All tiles of that type will be transparent, so choose wisely. You don’t want to make the ground semi invisible.

Technical Aspect

There are two ways to achieve the semi-transparency that you get when using translucent tiles. The other way depends on if the tileset includes a tile which already has lines of the blank colour streaking through it, creating a checkerboard pattern.

However, translucency uses alpha transparency, which is much quicker but more processor extensive. It’s a trade-off, but you only start seeing negative effects from using translucency if you use a massive amount of translucent tiles in multiple layers, where as you see the low-quality of the previous method immediatly. Another disadvantage is that alpha transparency will make the game use a lot of extra color hues, making it look bad in 8-bit rendering mode